It’s pretty clear both would prefer a shiny new entertainment center to a big unwieldy lawsuit, which Cannaday says is expected to cost $1 million in lawyer fees.

“Rather than being tied up in a lawsuit for the next couple years, we could be shoveling dirt,” says Cannaday. “We’re going to have an Orange Line to the airport by 2013. People are going to get right on that train and go down to Dallas or to other places because we don’t have enough here. We have no entertainment.”

Expect the more news in the lawsuit next Friday, when the judge is supposed to rule on whether the city can use hotel taxes to pay its lawyers.* Meanwhile, I’ll try to keep an eye on the discovery process to see if any interesting documents come to light.

* Actually, I think he’ll rule on whether a third party can argue that the city can’t use hotel taxes to pay its attorney fees. Got that? Me either.

What could have been...

== 6:30 p.m. ==

A judge will let Las Colinas Group’s multi-million dollar lawsuit against Irving go forward—albeit for far fewer millions than the developer originally sought.

State District Judge Carl Ginsberg tossed out a $100 million claim of “lost profits” that LCG said the city owed it after their joint venture to build a huge entertainment center in Las Colinas collapsed earlier this year.

But LCG can still sue Irving for $24 million in fees it says the city owes, and $15 million the developer says it invested in the would-be entertainment center, which is still an empty field of grass between Northwest Highway and Highway 114.

Instead, while the city is on the hook for much less money if it loses the suit, it still faces what could turn out to be a long, bitter and expensive legal battle.

A lawyer for LCG, Ernest Leonard, said he has already requested reams of internal city documents and plans to depose the mayor and city manager. Leonard told me he hopes the discovery process — already underway — will turn up documents as early as next week proving the city leaked information to a bond rating agency in order to sabotage the entertainment center’s funding. (I have no evidence the city did that, or that such documents exist.)

Mayor Beth Van Duyne doesn’t sound flustered.

“Shocker,” she drolled when I brought up the impending possibility of her deposition.

And the discovery process, she said, was a two-way street.

“I’d love to find out how they spent the 23 or 24 million dollars” the city paid LCG, she said. “They never even turned over a piece of dirt.”